Let's take a look at bid bots for example. A lot of times people with heavy votes do not focus on curation. This non-curation by many causes a market condition where advertising is required to be seen. So when a bid bot and a user of their services freely decide to help each other by doing business. The buyer feels like they are receiving something of value, else they wouldn't have paid for it.

I'm sure the seller also feels/or felt the same. I'm not sure about the current state of affairs with that business model after HF21. Also, I would be hard-pressed to tell you the difference between that and a gambling/gaming app or what have you. If one is more meritorious than the other, or which is the profiteer and which is the capitalist.

Markets are complex, they just happen on their own. It's much harder to design one from scratch from the top down and that's what steem tried to do, they tried to create a social media marketplace and just assumed that it would work the way they wanted it to without evolving how markets do. And you can call it evolving or devolving, but the market does what it wants to do. Tinker with and or break it and I suppose we'll see what happens.

Systems will either adapt and survive or they shut down and move elsewhere. I remember for a while there the Walton family enterprise was the scourge of the nation causing the local ma and pa shops to shut down. And now that we're in a trade war with China, the economy is shit, and Amazon is in its primacy it's causing people to panic because of the closures of various Walmarts in the US. I've got a wait and see approach it should be interesting to see where it goes. If we're going to experiment with this kind of stuff, I'd rather see it done on the internet.